Touch the Devil [antikvár]

PROLOGUE Vietnam 1968 The Medevac helicopter drifted across the delta at a thousand feet, her escort a Huey Cobra gunship keeping station to the left. Ram threatened, the clouds over the jungle in the far distance heavy with it, and thunder rumbled on the distant horizon. Inside the Medevac, Anne-Marie Audin sat in a comer, eyes closed, her back supported by a case of medical supplies. She was a small, oUve-sldnned girl with black hair razor-cut close to the skull, a concession to the living conditions of the Vietnam war front. She wore a camouflage jump jacket, unzipped at the front, a khaki bush shirt and pants tucked into French paratroopers' boots. The most interesting features were the cameras, two Nikons strung around her neck by leather straps; the pouches of the jump jacket contained, not ammunition, but a variety of lenses and dozens of packets of 35 millimetre film. The young medic squatting beside the negro Crew Chief gazed at her in frank admiration. The first two buttons of the khaki bush shirt were undone, giving a hint, no more, of the firm breasts rising and faUing gently as she slept. 'A long time since I saw anything like that,' he said. 'A real lady.' 'And then some, boy.' The Crew Chief passed him a cigarette. 'There's nowhere that girl hasn't been. She even jumped with the 503rd Paras at Katum last year. You name it, she's done it. Life magazine did an article on her six or seven months back. She's from Paris, would you believe that? And from the kind of family that owns a large slice of the Bank of France.' T^'l til ' i I. Iii , t . I I t-i ; Li. t ' ( ( I i i